This document outlines the operational and philosophical policy of the WorldWideWeb project at CERN. It serves to explain the team's understanding of information availability and collaboration.
Project Aim
The primary aim of the project is to promote communication and information availability for the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. However, isolating HEP from the rest of the world would be counter-productive. Therefore, our broader goal is the furtherance of a global web of information.
The WWW team believes that information of all types should be available as widely as possible to encourage universal progress.
Collaboration & Code Distribution
We actively encourage collaboration from both academic and commercial parties. The "web" is a living system that requires constant input, from porting code to different environments to developing new browsers.
Intellectual Property
- CERN Code: Generally freely available to academic bodies. For commercial organizations participating in global information exchange, fees are typically waived to encourage adoption.
- Public Domain: We are working toward releasing core project code under the General Public License (GPL).
- External Contributions: Code not originating at CERN remains under the terms set by the respective copyright holders.
Open Standards
To ensure the web remains a "Multiverse" rather than a closed system, the definitions of core protocols and formats are firmly in the public domain:
- HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
- The communication protocol used by the web is open and may be freely used by any developer.
- HTML (HyperText Markup Language)
- The standard data format for web documents is a public domain specification.